Pirates in Paradise

One morning, not far from a knob of coral called Assumption Island, Gilbert Victor caught a bonito, which he cleaned on deck and cooked in the galley. He ate curried bonito for lunch, saved enough for dinner, then settled himself low in the cockpit of a catamaran called Serenity, in a spot where the console shaded him from the equatorial sun.

The Serenity, thirty-eight feet fore to aft, was not Gilbert's boat. He was sailing her from Victoria, which is on the island of Mahé and the capital of his native Seychelles, to Madagascar for a Frenchman who owned her. That is how Gilbert made his living, sailing other people's yachts, a trade for which there is a reasonably consistent demand. The Seychelles, with its five-star resorts and finely groomed beaches, is a playground for the class of people who can afford their own blue-water yachts, and if these people lack the time or the inclination to sail to or from the islands, they can hire a workingman like Gilbert to do it for them. In the past decade, Gilbert had traversed most of the Indian Ocean. He'd been to Mauritius and the Maldives and Malaysia. He'd been north to Oman, and south to Cape Town three times, and he had pictures of all of those ports and all of those yachts on his digital camera.

After lunch, he passed the time scrolling through the camera. He had the stereo on, Creole music, playing loud. Then he heard a bang from the stern.

There goes the engine, he thought. Now we're fucked.

He unfolded his legs, stood, and ducked through the cabin door into a glaring sun. He saw four men, barefoot and ragged and holding guns, on the deck; five more were in a battered fiberglass skiff tethered to the Serenity.

"Who are you?" he asked. He was scared, of course, but also perpled.

Seychellois waters in the late winter of 2009 were still considered safe waters; armed bandits hadn't attacked a vessel anywhere near Assumption Island since at least as long as Gilbert had been alive, which was fifty-one years. Maybe these guys were simply lost and desperate and they had guns because… Well, hell, there really wasn't any reason for the guns.

"We are Indian Ocean coast guard," the knock-kneed man closest to him said. Gilbert chuckled nervously. "My friend, I have been around for quite a while, and I have never heard of such an organization," he said. "Maybe this is new in the last four days?"

The one who spoke stared at Gilbert for a moment. He seemed young, twentysomething, but also in command, less jumpy than the others. Gilbert noticed his teeth were crooked, the front ones overlapping.

"Look, my friend," Gilbert said again, "these are Seychelles waters."

"No, no," the man answered. "You have islands. We have water. We Somali pirate."

At that moment, Gilbert Victor was no longer perpled. He was only scared, and he's pretty sure it showed.

The notion that bandits boarding a catamaran would introduce themselves as "Indian Ocean coast guard" is not wholly preposterous. Somalia doesn't have a legitimate coast guard or, for that matter, any functioning government, and hasn't since 1992. So for almost a generation, its waters were plundered and polluted by foreigners. The fisheries were poached bare, and the 2004 tsunami washed ashore tons of toxic waste from barrels dumped offshore.

It could be argued, then, that early episodes of piracy close to the coast were a form of self-defense, peasants protecting their only economic resource with the only means at their disposal. Yet whatever the moral legitimacy of that argument, hijacking vessels also turned out to be very profitable. And so the practice—no, the industry, because that's what it's become—soon expanded. The Gulf of Aden, a choke point for any ship steaming to or from the Suez Canal, had been bountiful hunting: Pirates seized forty-two ships on 111 attempts in 2008, mostly in the Gulf (though the International Maritime Bureau suspects as many as half of all attacks go unreported). Military ships from the European Union and the United States and NATO increased patrols and secured a shipping lane, but that merely chased the pirates south, around the Horn of Africa. Patrols increased in those waters, too, but the Indian Ocean is enormous, impossible to thoroughly police even with an armada: In 2009, there were 217 attacks and forty-seven seizures over a much larger piece of water.

So by the beginning of last year, the favored counterpiracy tactic was simply to stay far away from the Somali shoreline. Considering that pirates typically set out in skiffs only marginally more seaworthy than an inflatable duck, 600 miles was considered an adequate safety buffer.

Assumption Island is well outside that 600-mile zone. In fact, it is more than a thousand miles from Somalia's pirate havens of Ely and Garacad and Harardhere. It lies at the southwestern tail of the Seychelles, 700 miles from the main island of Mahé, in a cluster of coral atolls known as the Aldabra group. The big ships preferred by the pirates, the tankers and freighters with their insurance policies and deep-pocketed owners, do not sail there. The Aldabras are sparse and isolated, a nature preserve on the United Nations list of World Heritage sites, and they attract mostly scientists and divers and fly fishermen.

But no pirates. Which was a blessing, for two reasons. One, the Seychelles is more or less indefensible, 115 islands flecked across 870,000 square miles of ocean—roughly the size of Western Europe—protected by only two coast guard boats. "It's been likened to patrolling Texas with one police car," says Jean-Paul Adam, the Seychellois secretary of state. Two, for all that territory, the Seychelles is a tiny nation of 85,000 citizens that survives almost exclusively on commercial fishing and tourism. Marauding pirates, or even sporadically opportunistic pirates, could destroy both industries.

Until March 2009, distance seemed to be the Seychelles' best defense, isolated by hundreds of miles of deep blue. But then, just as warships had chased the Somalis out of the Gulf of Aden, they chased them again from the African coast, pushing the pirates farther east in search of prey. "It's like squeezing a balloon," says Matthew Forbes, the British high commissioner to the Seychelles. "Put pressure one place and they pop up somewhere else."

On Friday March 27, 2009, twenty-three days after Somali pirates popped up on the Serenity, a 115-foot boat called the Indian Ocean Explorer sailed sixty miles from Cosmoledo, in the Aldabras, to Assumption with a crew of seven and eleven fishing tourists. That afternoon, the passengers—two Americans, two Canadians, and seven South Africans—disembarked to wait for a flight at the island airstrip, and at five thirty Captain Francis Roucou set a northeast course for home, which was Mahé.

Captain Roucou, who was 43, had been sailing for twenty-five years and captain of the Explorer for nine. She was an old boat, built as a research ship in the 1950s and outfitted now to carry divers and fishermen and the occasional scientific expedition. She sailed the Aldabras primarily, from autumn to spring, and the passengers she'd dropped at Assumption were the last of the season.

The Explorer motored away at nine knots across calm seas, the sun slipping away to the west, darkness settling over the ocean. Roucou retired to his quarters.

The watchman woke him at eleven forty. Roucou heard a commotion on deck. Two fiberglass skiffs were off the starboard stern. Thin, raggedy men had thrown grappling hooks over the Explorer's side rails.

Roucou hustled out of his cabin and started down the starboard side. Pirates were already on board. They saw the captain coming, and one of them fired two quick shots into the deck near Roucou's feet, then a few more over his head. Roucou stopped, stood stone still.

He thought of the Russians who'd chartered the Explorer early that season, in October. Rich guys, those Russians. They'd been worried about pirates and had asked Roucou if they'd be attacked. He told them no, the pirates were much farther north. One of the Russians had laughed. "Is no problem," he'd said. "We will pay them seven million! Eight million! If they don't kill us." Roucou wished the Russians were on board.

The pirate scowled, then dispatched a few of his men to search the Explorer. They returned, confirmed there were no passengers on board. The pirates were no longer pleased.

"Where tourists? Where?"

The tourist boats were a few hours to the south, three of them near Assumption Island. Roucou had seen them earlier that day: the Sea Bird, the Adventurer, and the Hebridean Spirit, with nearly 200 passengers and crew among them.

"There are none," Roucou told the pirates. "There's only us."

He'd answered quickly and surely, but the pirates did not believe him. Eight of them took most of the crew to the aft deck, and three stayed with Roucou and his chief engineer in the wheelhouse. One of them used the Explorer's satellite phone to call a contact in Somalia, who spoke perfect English. He put Roucou on the line with a man named Abdi.

"Tell them where the tourism boats are," Abdi said, "and they will let you go."

"There are no other boats. We are the last one."

The charter season was over, Roucou said, and everyone had sailed to Mahé.

"We will give you money," Abdi said. "A million dollars. Just tell them where the tourism boats are."

"There are none."

"Tell them," Abdi said, "or we will kill you."

Roucou said it again: "There are no other boats."

The next morning, March 28, Abdi was on the satellite phone again, running through the same list of inducements and threats—freedom, money, death—while Roucou repeated the lie that there were no other boats nearby.

Roucou suspected the pirates would, in fact, release him and his crew if they could capture another ship, if only out of practicality: There were eleven pirates aboard the Explorer, and likely they all would be needed to control everyone on, say, the Hebridean Spirit, the largest of the three tourist boats. More to the point, a handful of Seychellois sailors were a consolation prize. The pirates were hunting vacationers with money from wealthy nations that would pay a respectable ransom. The Explorer could easily be tossed back for something more profitable.

But what then? What if Roucou gave up another ship, traded a few dozen strangers for his own freedom? He would sail home to his wife and his three children, to the house he'd built near Anse à la Mouche (Beach of the Flies) with the shrine to the Blessed Virgin next to the carport, and he would tend to the white show pigeons in his front-yard coop, and he would sit on his porch and watch the light of the late afternoon wash over the ridgeline rising to the east. And he would stay there, on Mahé, because tourists would no longer want to sail to the far islands, where pirates had hijacked a boat and captured the passengers and held them hostage in Somalia. There would be no charters for Roucou to captain, and there would be no jobs for his crew or any of the other crews. Piracy in the seas to the north already had chased away the big yachts, the luxury boats that used to sail from the Mediterranean through the Suez Canal and down to the Seychelles. The marina at Eden Island, just south of Victoria, was built for rich people and their boats, and it was a lagoon of empty slips.

Abdi called again that evening, making the same promises and threats, Roucou still insisting the Explorer was the lone boat in those waters. Maybe he'd finally convinced them, or maybe they just got tired of hearing the same answer. Either way, they gave up hunting tourists. When Abdi hung up, the pirate who seemed to be in charge told Roucou to set a northerly course.

"Now," he told the captain, "we go Somalia."

The 'Serenity' was already in Somali waters by then, anchored off the coast of Garacad, a village 400 miles north of Mogadishu. There were three Seychellois on board—Gilbert Victor, Conrad Andre, and Robin Samson—and they'd sailed at gunpoint for more than two weeks, first west, then north along the Somali coast, stopping at Koyama and Kismayo and Mogadishu before settling at Garacad on Monday, March 23.¹

That night, a Somali named Hassan boarded the catamaran. He was taller and older than the pirates, and he spoke excellent English. He introduced himself as the interpreter. "Mr. Gilbert," he said, "these people would be happy to let you go—" Hassan turned to Conrad as he continued, and Gilbert thought he saw the trace of a smile—"after you give them $3 million."

Gilbert was despondent and had been for weeks. He'd started crying the first time a pirate put a gun to his head, which was the first day, telling them, "No, you can't do this, I'm just a workingman." The pirates called him a liar. They'd captured Gilbert on a luxury catamaran, after all, and they'd scrolled through his digital camera, saw all those pictures of big yachts and foreign ports, of Gilbert smiling with white men holding foaming magnums of champagne. "You have money plenty," they told him. And if he didn't, if Gilbert really was a working stiff, the pirates assumed the Seychelles was a wealthy nation. But that's a facade. Gilbert's wife works in the laundry at a five-star resort, and she doesn't make enough to sleep on the sheets she cleans.

Negotiations started the next day, Hassan relaying the pirates' asking price to a Seychellois police ocer. Gilbert overheard Hassan say, "If you don't have the money, make an offer." He did not find that comforting.

Five days later, on Sunday, March 29, the pirate with the crooked teeth came aboard. He was wearing a clean white sleeveless T-shirt, and he was laughing. Gilbert had learned his name was Abdooli—or at least that's what it sounded like—but he had taken to calling him Little Captain. Gilbert brightened, certain he had good news.

"Gilbert, Seychelles say no money," Little Captain announced, and he kept smiling as he swung the barrel of a pistol to the back of Gilbert's head. "I make you spare part." He waited while Gilbert figured out what he meant, that he'd let surgeons carve out his organs. Then he laughed again.

"Go ahead and kill me," Gilbert said.

The Little Captain stopped laughing but kept the gun at Gilbert's head. "I won't kill you," he said. "You take me high seas. We go high seas now."

The Serenity and her crew—Gilbert, Conrad, Robin—were being conscripted into piracy. For a band of Somali pirates, prowling the open ocean in a catamaran was an upgrade. Typically, a dozen or so men and boys with AK-47's and rocket-propelled grenades would set out in an open fiberglass boat no more than thirty feet long, overloaded with drums of diesel and jugs of motor oil and towing one or two smaller skiffs. Those were excellent tactical vessels: Such little boats are almost impossible to pick up on radar from more than a mile or so, and by then it's too late for a trawler or a freighter or a tanker to outrun a dingy ripping across the ocean with an oversize outboard engine clamped to its back end. The downside, however, is that those molded tubs have no business drifting beyond a harbor breakwater; in blue water, the risk of swamping or capsizing is dangerously high.

But the Serenity was designed for ocean sailing. And what merchant ship suspects a catamaran might be flying the skull and crossbones?

How many men were on the Serenity when she was hijacked is unclear. Gilbert maintains there were only two, himself and Conrad Andre, with whom he'd been delivering yachts for a decade. According to Gilbert, Robin Samson was kidnapped thirty-six hours later from a sloop called the Virgo, where Robin was working as a guide and dive master for four Italian tourists. Robin tells the same story: Four pirates boarded the Virgo, two remained with the Italians, and the other two ferried him to the Serenity. (Conrad doesn't say anything to reporters, but Seychellois officials confirm he has given an identical account.) Yet no sloop Virgo has ever been reported hijacked, menaced, or even to exist. Nor have four Italian divers gone missing. Which is why pretty much everyone doubts that story. Rather, there is a universal belief among Seychellois officials (and civilians) that Robin boarded the Serenity near his home on Praslin Island, northeast of Mahé. But he can't admit that, because he didn't arrange the proper paperwork to allow him to sail to Madagascar, which means he would have been leaving the country illegally.

Why would a man slip out of his own country on a catamaran sailing in the general direction of Africa? "People think we were involved in drugs," Gilbert says. Yes, that is what many, many people think. Running contraband is not an unheard-of sideline in the yacht-delivering business, after all, and the Virgo tale seems so improbable that it inevitably appears to be a clumsy cover story for something nefarious. Moreover, there is also a question of why Gilbert was near Assumption Island, far west of a typical course from Mahé to Madagascar. (He said he was going there to put in for repairs on a busted engine.) Then again, the Virgo version can't be disproved, nor is there any evidence that anyone on the Serenity was up to anything illegal. (Gilbert, Conrad, and Robin all deny they were running drugs.) But there is no doubt that all three men were kidnapped and held captive in Somalia.

Gilbert started the catamaran's engine and puttered over to the Nipayia, a Greek-owned tanker that had been hijacked a few days earlier. A fuel line was snaked from the Nipayia onto the Serenity, and she took on more than twice her normal capacity of diesel. With the catamaran stocked, a skiff tied behind, and eight Somalis on board, Little Captain checked his GPS unit and told Gilbert, "You go south."

Which he did, all through the night. The next morning, when Little Captain consulted his GPS again and told Gilbert, "No, no, you go east," he did that, too. For seven days, Gilbert steered the Serenity whichever direction he was told. He says Little Captain put a small homemade bomb, or what he said was a bomb—a glass jar stuffed with nails and screws—under the captain's chair. He says Little Captain told him, "You sit here. You watch for boat," and then pointed at his bomb and said, "You call navy, I blow up. I go to Allah." Little Captain smiled at that, and Gilbert said, "I'll go with you."

At first light on April 6, Gilbert saw a boat on the horizon. She was a Taiwanese tuna boat called Win Far 161, fishing some 200 miles north of the Seychelles. Four pirates climbed into the skiff, and Gilbert watched them speed toward the Win Far. By midmorning Gilbert and everyone else who'd been on the Serenity had boarded the Win Far, and the catamaran was roped to the stern along with the attack skiff.

The Win Far, with its Taiwanese captain at the helm but the Somalis in control, steamed west for two days and two nights. Shortly before dawn on Wednesday, April 8, the engines fell silent. Then Gilbert heard the growl of the outboard on the skiff. It revved, and then the sound faded as the little boat skipped away across the ocean.

Four Somalis gunned the skiff over glassine seas, the big outboard pushing them at twenty-six knots toward the stern of a freighter lumbering south. She was a container ship called the Maersk Alabama, more than 500 feet long. Also, she was flying a United States flag. A trophy! A big ship like that, an American ship, would sit off the coast of Garacad like a monument until she was ransomed. And how much would the Americans pay? How much was an American captain worth? Ten million? Twenty? There was no way the pirates could know, because no Somali gang had seized an American ship. And now here these four were, three miles out and closing fast, two miles, one.

Two red flares streaked from the bridge. The crew knew they were coming, but what did that matter? Merchant vessels almost always went to sea unarmed. The Somalis never backed off the throttle as they ripped a few warning shots from their AKs.

They brought the skiff to midship on Alabama's port side, threw a grappling hook over the rail, and started climbing. By 8:10 a.m., they'd seized the bridge and had the captain and three of his crew of twenty at gunpoint. All they had to do now was force Captain Richard Phillips to set a course for Somalia.

The ship lurched hard to one side, then to the other, rolling twenty degrees each way, back and forth. Deep in the bowels of the Alabama, in the steering room far below the bridge, one of the crew was swinging the rudder, roiling the sea until it swamped the pirates' skiff, shook it loose, and flipped it over. And then the big ship went silent: The crew cut the engines, the electrical, everything, and left the Alabama drifting dead in the water.

The crew wasn't cooperating. The pirates had to round them up, get control. The Somalis were outnumbered five to one, but they had the guns.

The Alabama's third mate, who was on the bridge, was ordered to go down and get the rest of the crew, most of whom had locked themselves in the steering room. But the Somalis sent him alone, without a guard, so the mate did the sensible thing and hid. When he didn't return, a pirate escorted another Alabama sailor belowdecks to find him. Which was a mistake: In a dark passageway, the crew jumped the Somali. Now they had a hostage, too.

The rest of the day was a standoff, the pirates demanding their comrade's return, the Alabama crew telling the pirates to get off their ship, which had been headed to Mombasa with a cargo of relief supplies. Near sundown, the two sides brokered a deal, the Somali hostage and the ship's lifeboat in exchange for the pirates' abandoning the Alabama. After Phillips showed three of the pirates how to drive the lifeboat, the two sides were to swap prisoners, the Somali going down a ladder as Phillips came up. But the pirates reneged and kept Phillips. For days, the drama played out on the Indian Ocean and on American cable networks, a standoff between four Somalis and a guided-missile destroyer, the USS Bainbridge, that had come to the Alabama's aid. On the fourth day, with the lifeboat tied by a long line to the destroyer, a pirate named Abduwali Muse went aboard the Bainbridge to negotiate, which is why he is still alive in a New York detention center: On April 12, Navy Seals on the fantail of the destroyer killed the other three with simultaneous shots to the head.²

The Win Far, meanwhile, steamed back to Garacad. The Serenity was tied behind her, but Gilbert, Conrad, and Robin were moved onto the long-liner with her crew. Gilbert was held in the wheelhouse, separate from Robin and Conrad. He doesn't know why. The Somalis gave him an extra pillow, though.

In October, FBI agents flew to the Seychelles and showed Gilbert a photo array, from which he identified Muse as Little Captain. Muse, however, argues that he was only 16 at the time and spoke no English, which would mean he was unlikely to be a pirate commandant and incapable of conversing with Gilbert. In any case, federal prosecutors in January added the hijackings of the Serenity and the Win Far—identified as Ship 1 and Ship 2 in the amended indictment—to the charges against Muse.

Roucou's ship, the Indian Ocean Explorer, dropped anchor off Harardhere, on the central Somali coast about 200 miles south of Garacad, on Thursday, April 2. Captain Roucou told his crew they almost certainly would remain there for two months, maybe longer. That was a matter of simple logic: The pirates wanted money, the Seychelles didn't have any, and it was going to take a while for those two positions to be reconciled.

Abdi came aboard the next day. He was a slight man, and he told Roucou that he used to work for the United Nations but now made his living as a negotiator. He interpreted for five or six gangs, all of which worked for the same boss but independently, as if they were competing franchises of a piracy conglomerate. Abdi took a cut of every ransom he negotiated, and he kept those amounts confidential, which lessened the odds, marginally, that the gangs would steal from one another.

The pirates who took the Explorer, Abdi told Roucou, were one of the more successful crews. They'd grabbed the Faina, a Ukrainian freighter carrying a load of weapons, including thirty-three Russian tanks, to Mombasa in September 2008; two months later, they'd hijacked the thousand-foot Sirius Star, the largest ship ever captured by any pirates anywhere, a tanker drafting low with 2 million barrels of Saudi crude in her holds.

Roucou heard more men coming aboard the Explorer. Abdi told him the boss, the man who ran a half-dozen gangs, wanted to see him.

Roucou stretched a smile across his face. He'd decided that his captors would treat a friendly hostage more gently than a belligerent one. "We are all African brothers," he told them at one point, patting his arm as if their skin were a badge of solidarity. "Yes, brothers," said the pirates, who were many shades darker, black coffee to Roucou's café au lait. The line was bullshit, but it had seemed to work. A day before they reached Somalia, one of his African brothers let Roucou sneak a couple of satellite calls to the Seychelles—to the government, so it would know the Explorer had been hijacked, and to his family, so they would know he was alive.

He smiled when he stepped out on deck to meet the boss, who was a big man of 50 or so. He was wearing an army field jacket, tight shorts, and on his right hip, a large-caliber pistol.

"You captain?" he said.

The boss wobbled as he spoke. His eyes were bloodshot. Boss was drunk.

"Yes," Roucou said. "I am the captain."

In an improbably quick motion, the boss flicked the pistol off his right hip and leveled it at Roucou's chest. Abdi pivoted into Roucou, wrapped his arms around him, and pushed him back. Two bodyguards grabbed the boss and started pulling him away. Abdi kept pushing Roucou until they were on the Explorer's aft deck.

The boss, Abdi explained, had been told his gang had captured a tourist ship. His first disappointment had been learning there were no tourists on board: For a boatload of wealthy vacationers, the pirates would have opened their negotiations at $25 million. But even without tourists, the Explorer, the boss had been told, was a high-end vessel; two days earlier, even the European newspapers had reported that pirates captured "a luxury yacht" in the Seychelles.

And then the boss found this tub anchored off the coast. The Explorer was a fine ship, well equipped and comfortable, but she was a half century old. With only seven Seychellois on board, her price would have to drop again.

"Four million," Abdi said.

Roucou didn't blink. "You'll never get $4 million," he said. "It's not going to happen. The Seychelles is a poor country. It doesn't have $4 million."

"Then you will stay."

"We can stay for five years," Roucou said. "You still won't get $4 million."

The Explorer had supplies to last six weeks. Roucou put his crew on half rations so they could make three months.

Abdi and Hassan, the negotiator for the pirates holding Gilbert and the Serenity, have jobs because Somali piracy is, in fact, a business of negotiation. Looting and plundering, simply stealing stuff, is both impractical and unprofitable. What possible use would a few dozen Somalis have for the Sirius Star and her 2 million barrels of crude? They have no pipelines, no fleet of trucks to move bootleg oil, even assuming they could hide a tanker the size of three football fields long enough to o±oad it. The ship itself is useless: They can't go joyriding in a supertanker or hire themselves out as wildcat transporters. A vessel such as the Explorer, meanwhile, will have gear and electronics that could be stripped out, but the net would be pennies, hardly worth the risk of a dozen men going to sea in a dinghy. As for the Serenity, there is not now, nor will there ever be, a black-market used-boat lot of any significance on the lawless Somali coast.

The only real money, then, is in ransom. That is a more workable venture when physical cargo is involved, because anything that can be assigned a concrete monetary value—weapons, say, or oil—can be haggled over until a mutually acceptable level of extortion is reached. The oil on the Sirius Star, for instance, was worth about $100 million. The pirates opened the bidding for its safe return at $25 million but eventually settled for $3 million—in effect, a 3 percent surcharge on the cargo but still a windfall for the Somalis. The tanks and antiaircraft guns and crates of ammunition on the Faina were returned for $3.2 million, a relative bargain for military hardware estimated to be worth $30 million. In January 2010, another tanker, the Greek Maran Centaurus, was released after a ransom of at least $5.5 million was dropped on her deck. (That payoff, the largest known to date, set off a seaborne rumble between rival gangs in which at least three died, thus explaining why Abdi is discreet about his negotiations.)

People, on the other hand, present more complicated negotiations precisely because they are not commodities. There is no secondary market for Francis Roucou or Gilbert Victor, and their worth cannot be fid in dollars and cents. They may be invaluable to their families and friends, but that value is intangible and, unless those families and friends have extraordinary resources, irrelevant. Moreover, no nation can afford to start buying back its citizens from bandits. If, for instance, the Seychelles paid $4 million for the captain and crew of the Explorer—$571,000 a head—why wouldn't Somalis start grabbing catamarans and sloops like bills from an ATM? Who would stop them? The Seychelles' two patrol boats?

Captain Roucou understood those realities. As a practical matter, he and his crew were worth less than an oil tanker. There was nothing to do except settle in and wait for the pirates to figure that out, too.

In Victoria, negotiators stalled for time, hoping to keep Roucou and his crew alive until they could figure out how to get them home. In Harardhere, the pirates feared the delay was tactical, that the Seychellois were plotting a raid. They waited ten days, then ferried Roucou ashore and into the bush, where he'd be nearly impossible to rescue. (Roucou's crew remained on the Explorer.) He had no shelter from the sun, no bedroll to sleep on at night, and the pirates forced him to call Victoria and report how badly the conditions of his captivity had deteriorated. The negotiators thought it was a ruse, the pirates pretending to abuse their captive. Roucou was in the middle of two parties playing chicken, but neither side understood the rules. The Seychelles had no idea how to negotiate with pirates, and the pirates had never strong-armed the Seychelles before.

On his eleventh day in the bush, the pirates returned Roucou to his ship. The strategy hadn't swayed the Seychellois government, so there was no sense wasting men to guard him onshore when he could be confined in the Explorer's salon. And that's where he stayed, eating half rations with his crew, for the next six weeks.

Abdi kept Roucou posted on the latest pirate news. He told him about the botched attack on the Maersk Alabama and about the disastrous seizure of a French yacht called the Tanit, in which French commandos mistakenly killed a young father they were trying to rescue. Roucou had also been told about the Serenity, about Gilbert and Conrad and Robin being held farther north. The two Somali factions were trying to negotiate a package deal, all ten Seychellois for whatever they could get. But weeks passed, and the talks remained at an impasse.

The pirates blinked first, at the end of May, abruptly dropping their demand by more than half, to $1.5 million. "Two days, you go home," one of the pirates told Roucou. Two days passed. "Three days, no problem, you go home." Three days passed. And so it went, the next three weeks measured in segments of two and three days, a spark of hope, then nothing, again and again. The fifth or sixth time Roucou was told he would be going home soon, he asked one of the pirates about Gilbert and the other men on the Serenity, if they were still part of the deal.

"They killed," the pirate said. "Three days ago."

Roucou took a moment to catch his breath. "Why?"

"Those people up there, they are animals. They kill people all the time, no reason." A pause, Roucou and the Somali staring at each other. "They eat white people's meat."

The captain felt a twitch of nausea. He really wished he hadn't asked in front of his own crew.

Later that day, June 21, Abdi came aboard and motioned for Roucou to come out of the salon. He said the pirates, including the big boss and some of the elders, had held a meeting at which they decided there was no point in holding out for a sizable ransom. They agreed to release the Explorer crew for a token, enough to cover the cost of fuel and food and guards, maybe padded a bit to save face. They'd slashed their original demand almost 90 percent, to $450,000, which would be paid by the company that owns the Explorer. "Tomorrow," Abdi said, "you go home." He smiled.

Roucou went back into the salon. "Pray tomorrow everything will be okay," he told his crew. He did not tell them why, because he didn't want to get their hopes up. He just led them in prayer, first to God and then to the Blessed Virgin.

Roucou awoke before dawn and peered out a porthole, staring at the beach. He did not move for more than an hour, and when the crew asked why, he did not answer.

The sun rose, and in the light of early morning, Roucou saw a small white boat motoring toward the Explorer. As it got closer, he recognized the Somali piloting it, a man named Awali, who'd been one of the pirates in the attack skiffs near Assumption. Almost one hundred days after he boarded the Explorer for the first time, Awali came aboard again. He was smiling.

"Is okay," he said. "You go."

The Explorer crew was ferried to shore, then packed into four-wheel drives for a thumping nine-hour trek inland, where they spent the night in a hut. The next morning, at least twenty Somalis in Jeeps, armed with AKs and RPGs, escorted the Seychellois to a small airstrip, where a turboprop was waiting to fly them to Kenya. When Roucou marveled at the show of force, the Somalis told him that once a ransom had been agreed upon, they were honor-bound to ensure their captives departed safely without being grabbed by a rival gang or, worse, by Al Shabaab, the Islamists loosely aliated with Al Qaeda. If the pirates couldn't hold up their end of the bargain, why would anyone do business with them?

A plane chartered by the Seychelles government met Roucou and his crew in Kenya and flew them to Mahé, where a jubilant crowd had gathered at the airport just south of Victoria. They were greeted as national heroes, which was only proper, because they are. Nearly 200 tourists had sailed away from Assumption Island three months earlier because the Explorer did not.

Gilbert had not been killed, of course, though there were times when he suspected dying would be preferable to living as a captive on the Win Far. He was still confined to the wheelhouse, his only companion a Taiwanese sailor who spoke no English or French. They tried to communicate with clumsy sign language and doodles and sketches, but there really wasn't much to say. So Gilbert retreated into his own head. He would sing sometimes, morose and homesick songs, a few bars from a Creole tune—Oh, rolling sea, please carry me back home again—or Bobby Bare's classic "Detroit City": I want to go home / I want to go home / Oh, how I want to go home.

"Gilbert, you go crazy," the pirates would say when they heard him. "You no sing. You sit. You sleep." And then he'd sit and sleep and feel himself going a little crazier.

Like Roucou, he knew the Seychelles wouldn't pay cash for his release. In late May, when the Explorer crew was still being held at Harardhere, there'd been reason for optimism. Twenty-three Somalis had been picked up either in or near Seychelles waters in late April and early May. They were all obviously pirates, or aspiring pirates, and Gilbert's captors in Garacad were hoping they might arrange a trade, all those Somalis for the ten Seychellois. "You call friend Seychelles, call many times," a pirate told him. "Send my friend Somalia, you go Seychelles. No money. No money. You go." But then the Explorer crew was ransomed, so the Somalis stayed in the Seychelles; Gilbert, Conrad, and Robin remained in Somalia; and negotiations stalled. Which was understandable: As a matter of national policy, swapping alleged bandits for citizens is no more acceptable than paying straight cash. If pirates know they can retrieve their compatriots by jacking a few innocents, they will.

When the guards weren't watching, Gilbert would use the satellite phone in the wheelhouse to call home, but sometimes that made being a hostage even worse. One month led into another and still another, and he still hadn't come back, and his wife stopped believing he ever would. When he called, she would weep and wail, and in the background Gilbert could hear his grown daughter weep and wail, and their heartbreak and terror would make Gilbert weep, too, and he wondered if they'd all be better off if the pirates put everyone out of their misery.

But, no, the pirates couldn't do that. It is difficult to ransom a live body but nigh on impossible to ransom a dead one.

So Gilbert sat and slept and sang, and June turned into July, and his hair, usually cropped to stubble, grew bushy, and his beard, usually shaved clean, was thick and unruly. Gilbert is a stocky man, broad in the shoulders and round in the belly, but weight melted away with the summer. By August, he'd lost thirty-five pounds.

Gilbert woke up on the first Saturday in September, exactly six months after the capture of the Serenity, and decided he wanted to cut his hair and shave his beard. He did not know why, other than that he was weary of the whiskers and the frizz, but he found a razor and cleaned himself up.

The next day, Sunday, September 6, he saw a pirate named Malooee on the Win Far's phone. He was an older man in his fifties who spoke respectable English, and Gilbert liked him, to the extent that one can like a pirate. He'd first met him in March, when Malooee came aboard the Serenity when she was anchored at Kismayo. "Let these people go," Malooee had told Little Captain. "This is a small boat, and these people don't have money." When the pirates said no, Malooee shook Gilbert's hand and patted his shoulder, as if to say he was sorry, and then he was gone. He reappeared in August, and he seemed surprised to find Gilbert on the Win Far. "Gilbert," he said, "you no go Seychelles?" Gilbert shook his head, and Malooee shrugged his shoulders.

Now Malooee smiled as he hung up the Win Far's phone. He turned to Gilbert. "One hour," he said, "you go home."

He did not explain why, and Gilbert did not care. He and Robin and Conrad rode a dinghy to shore, sprinted to an SUV, and then jounced through the bush to a small airstrip. He heard the buzz of two light planes in the distance, and he feared it was all a setup, that the Somalis were using them as bait to lure more Seychellois they could kidnap.

The planes landed. Twenty-three Somalis climbed out. Gilbert, Conrad, and Robin got into one of the aircraft, which trundled down the runway and into the sky.

The Seychellois government is adamant that it did not trade twenty-three Somali pirates for three of its citizens. True, the Somalis flown to Africa were almost certainly pirates. There is no legitimate reason for squads of men to be bobbing around the Indian Ocean in tiny skiffs stuffed with small arms and drums of fuel. Common sense, to say nothing of recent history, suggests such men in such boats are hunting bigger ships.

But simply being in those skiffs with all those weapons and all that fuel was not, at that time, illegal. Actually attacking another ship, successfully or not, has always been against international law, and in some instances merely pursuing another vessel might be prosecutable. But piracy law had not evolved appreciably since the reign of Henry VIII, and so there was no prohibition against appearing to be an off-duty pirate. (In March, the Seychelles National Assembly passed a conspiracy law that does make it illegal.) Still, when a European naval frigate or a Seychellois patrol boat stumbled across a skiff or three full of Somalis, they couldn't very well leave them drifting to go about their business or strip them of their fuel and food and leave them to the mercy of the sea. So on April 27, nine Somalis were picked up on the northern edge of Seychellois waters, another three were plucked from a twenty-foot skiff on May 2, and eleven more were arrested near Marianne Island on May 4, all of whom were locked up in the prison near Victoria.

But what law had those Somalis broken? Even a weapons charge, tenuous under any circumstances, was impossible, since the Somalis dumped their guns overboard; all the Seychellois recovered were a few stray shell casings rolling around the hull. "So the government was stuck with twenty-three pirates," says Wavel Ramkalawan, who leads the opposition Seychelles National Party. "What the hell do they do with those pirates? They can't take them into court on any charge. They can't let them out on bail—where are they going to go?"

By late summer, sending them back to Somalia was determined to be the most reasonable answer. If the pirates in Garacad were perhaps led to believe that the return of twenty-three compatriots might be expedited if they released three Seychellois hostages, what was the harm? What better deal was either side going to get? And if they agreed on that point, then insisting that Gilbert and Robin and Conrad be at the airstrip when the Somalis were delivered would simply be an ecient use of resources. True, that might all seem an overly delicate parsing of terms, but all diplomacy—and hostage negotiations are just the roughest form of diplomacy—requires semantic niceties.

In any case, the transfer did not go smoothly. After the two planes, one carrying Gilbert and his shipmates, left the airstrip near Garacad, they landed near the town of Garowe to refuel. At which point they were all detained by local soldiers for the authorities in Puntland, an autonomous region in Somalia. The aircrews were arrested for landing illegally in Puntland, but Gilbert says he and Robin and Conrad were treated as guests, lavished with baskets of fresh fruit and taken shopping for new clothes, courtesy of the Puntlandians. Six days later, the three Seychellois flew to Kenya, where they boarded a commercial flight to Victoria. At the airport, reporters asked questions that none of the three wanted to answer beyond the obvious, which was that they'd had a miserable time in Somalia and had not expected to ever return to Mahé. Mostly, Gilbert wanted to go home. His wife was not waiting for him at the airport, because she'd been told so many times he was coming home and he never did and she didn't believe he would this time, either, and she wouldn't believe it until she saw him standing in the doorway of their home halfway up the mountain on the road to Beau Vallon.

When she did see him, she started to sob, and Gilbert started to shake until he wrapped his arms around her and kissed her. And then they stood there, holding each other until they cried themselves dry.

When he was younger, Michael Rosette wanted to study hydrography, which is basically the mapping of water, and the only way he could do that was to join the coast guard. So he enlisted and studied, and he helped chart the sea around the Seychelles' inner islands, and eventually he became a world-class hydrographer who now sits on a United Nations panel studying continental shelves (which is both more interesting and more important than it sounds).

But he was also a sailor, and for twenty-seven years he did the routine and mostly peaceful things required of the Seychelles Coast Guard. He patrolled the archipelago and boarded poaching long-liners and purse seiners and watched for boats dumping oil and waste and, on occasion, rescued the crew of a foundering vessel. Rosette rose through the ranks, promoted again and again, all the way up to lieutenant colonel, and then, in the September of his twenty-eighth year of service, about the time Gilbert Victor was flying home, he was put in charge of the entire guard.

He is a thin and soft-spoken man, and one apparently given to calming understatement. "The only thing that has changed," he says in recounting his career, "is the piracy issue."

Yes, the piracy issue, as if it were a reconfigured fisheries regulation. Rosette knows how high the stakes are. After a lull for the autumn monsoons, the attacks picked up again in October, to the point where there were near daily reports of attempted hijackings, punctuated by successful ones. On October 23, a retired British couple, Paul and Rachel Chandler, were captured barely sixty miles out of Victoria on their yacht, the Lynn Rival. They are not wealthy, the British government refuses to pay a ransom, and at press time they were still being held in the Somalia bush.

The Seychelles islands are quite secure, as are the waters around Mahé and the rest of the inner islands; indeed, overall tourism dipped a barely perceptible 1 percent in last year's cratering economy. The effect on the seaborne industries, however, has already been devastating. The tuna catch is down nearly a third as the fleet has moved south to safer yet less productive waters, which in turn pinches the tuna cannery on Mahé, the nation's largest employer. Port calls have been cut in half, and cruise lines have diverted their routes. "The luxury-yacht-rental business in the southern islands is dead," says Secretary of State Jean-Paul Adam. "Dead." And if the pirates were to finally succeed at grabbing a boat full of tourists? "Catastrophic," Rosette says.

To defend the Seychelles' waters, Rosette has approximately one hundred sailors, an airplane, and those two patrol boats, which alternate weeklong missions. Covering all that territory in seven days is, of course, impossible, so the Seychelles has called in reinforcements. The European Union and the United States both rotate naval vessels through, and fly surveillance aircraft from Mahé. "We use intelligence," Rosette says. "There are a lot of vessels in the area, and aircraft passing over that provide very good information."

And there have been successes. Arresting those twenty-three Somalis, for instance; even if they were eventually repatriated, at least they were taken off the field for a few months. Later, on December 5, an EU aircraft spotted three pirate boats—two attack skiffs and a slightly larger mother skiff—a little more than 200 miles northwest of Mahé. The Topaz, one of the coast guard's patrol boats, steamed toward them. In the dark of December 6, the Topaz's radar picked up two targets, three miles out and closing at twenty knots. When the skiffs were a little more than a half mile out, red tracer rounds slit the sky. Hey, Major Simon Laurencine, the commander of the Topaz, thought, those are bullets. Thirty-two years in the coast guard, and now he's getting shot at. "I've never been in a war," he says, "but this was a real situation, with real bullets in the air."

The Topaz returned fire, warning shots, and the pirates began chucking weapons into the sea. ("Once they know they're in trouble, they just stop," says Rosette. "They might try to destroy the evidence, but they stop.") By daylight, the Topaz had eleven Somalis in custody, three automatic rifles, and one rocket-propelled grenade that didn't get dumped quickly enough, and two skiffs, the third having sunk after it collided with the patrol boat.

The reason those arrests are notable is that those eleven can actually be tried. Shooting at a coast guard boat is a specific crime. "We should get on with it and show them we're serious," says Wavel Ramkalawan, who negotiated early on with Gilbert Victor's captors. "If Hassan's men do not come home, he'll know we're serious."

On the other hand, so what? So what if a few Somalis squander their lives in the new Seychellois prison wing being built just for them? Why would that stop any other Somali so inclined from trying to escape a decrepit life in a collapsed nation, even if the only plausible way out is in a leaky skiff? There are three of those boats tied up at the coast guard dock in Victoria, wretched little craft, none more than twenty-five feet long, littered with syringes and antibiotics to fight off the eye infections and skin boils that erupt after days and weeks crammed into a floating cage. Two of the attack skiffs are propped up onshore, their hulls pasted with fiberglass tape and smeared with paint as cheap camouflage, and they look as if they could capsize in a stiff wind right there on land. They are the detritus of desperate men, and there are hundreds more motoring around the ocean.

"Solve the problem in Somalia," says Rosette. "If there was a government in Somalia, if there was security, if people would have jobs, the problem would be solved. Imagine if there was a police force, if there was a judiciary.…"

He lets that hang for a moment. Yes, imagine. Because there isn't and hasn't been, and no one seems to have the vaguest notion of how to change that.

"If you solve the problem onshore," he says finally, "there will not be a problem at sea."

And the problem cannot be solved at sea, either. True, the pirates are surely frustrated: By one estimate, their success rate—actually seizing a vessel they attack—dropped from 63 percent in 2007 to 22 percent last year. Moreover, hundreds have been arrested and are awaiting trial, including dozens in Kenya; in Puntland, 154 have already been tried and convicted, and another seventy-two suspects stand accused.

But those achievements, such as they are, have required an astonishing mobilization of resources. The French and Spanish are arming their commercial fleets, the Seychelles is building a new prison wing, the EU, NATO, and the U.S. are patrolling the seas and putting surveillance craft in the air—all at a cost of many tens of millions of dollars to try to thwart men and boys with secondhand guns from a ruined and pitiable patch of African desert.

Yet still they keep coming, Somalia spitting her sons out onto the open seas.

In the first two weeks of March 2010, the beginning of the peak pirate season following the winter monsoons, at least forty suspected pirates were arrested, including eleven sent to the Seychelles. A Danish destroyer foiled an attack near the Horn of Africa, a French frigate grabbed twenty-two suspects eighty-five miles off the coast of Mogadishu, and on March 14 armed guards on a Spanish tuna boat chased away an attack skiff a mere eighty miles from Mahé.

The pirates have become a permanent nuisance, a risk to be managed, an occasional consequence to be suffered. For Francis Roucou, that meant spending the season on Mahé. The ship he captained for nearly a decade, the Indian Ocean Explorer, was gone. The pirates torched her soon after releasing Roucou and his crew, burned her to the waterline, and let her carcass sink to the bottom. Probably wouldn't have mattered if he'd been able to bring her home, anyway. Tourists don't want to sail to the southern islands. Safer to fly. But he has no regrets about sacrificing three months of his life to pirates. "This is a beautiful country," he says one afternoon when he's sitting on his porch, the green mountain of Mahé rising beyond the hibiscus bush in his yard. "And I would rather die than betray my country."

Robin Samson is off the water, too. He's living on his father-in-law's land on a hill above a beach on Praslin. He makes plaster casts of tropical fish that he paints and sells from a stand on the side of the road, where there are also some wood carvings and jewelry and, tethered to a perch, a bat that has been known to bite people. "Now," he says, "I am a craftsman." He does not sound enthusiastic.

He doesn't talk about his months in captivity with any noticeable emotion or in abundant detail. He thought Little Captain treated the three of them as assets to be protected, which, all things considered, is about as well as one could hope to be treated. He never thought he would be killed or tortured. He doesn't offer much beyond that. "If you've talked to Gilbert," Robin says, "he's told you everything."

Conrad Andre doesn't tell any story at all anymore. He's working charters, and he'll answer his cell phone and say he'll be back at Eden Island at five and he'll meet you somewhere at six, but he won't show up, and he'll do this or something similar several times until, finally, he stops answering his phone.

As for Gilbert, when he tells his story, it comes out in spurts and with frequent interruptions because certain parts, many parts, make Gilbert cry and he has to wipe his eyes and swallow the lump from his throat. "I am not in favor of going to war in Somalia," he says at one point. "But I am in favor of killing these people in small boats."

But he can't do that. So he manages the risk as best he can. He's back at sea, skippering yachts again. He's already sailed from Salalah, in Oman, to Mahé, a route that, no matter how circuitous, couldn't help but take him through pirate waters, because all of the eastern Indian Ocean is now pirate waters.

"We sailors, we are what you call thickheaded people," he says. "And what can I do? This is how I make my bread."

Two weeks later, he flew to Dubai to sail someone else's boat to the Seychelles.

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